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Summary: The Middle East region is a key player in the world energy market today. It holds approximately over 50% of the world's proven fossil fuel reserves. Yet, the region is significantly challenged by the large dependence on finite fossil fuel resources in its primary energy supply. The intricate relationship between climate change mitigation and the development of energy systems underlines great uncertainty over the future of energy development in the Middle East. Such uncertainty is greatly linked to growing energy demands and the region's capacity to transition to low‐carbon energy systems. Over the past 20 years, the total primary energy demand in the Middle has almost tripled due to rapid population growth and economic development. Notably, most of the growing energy demand was concentrated in 5 countries, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, and the UAE. These 5 countries represented around 82% of the total primary energy demand in 2015, with Saudi Arabia and Iran alone accounted for 60%. The core question of this paper is what are the possible implications of growing energy demands in these countries and which sectors will entail significant increases in the projected energy requirements? The significance of the work presented here stems from analyzing 4 major countries that constitute the largest share in Middle East's total energy consumption and associated emissions. Examining these 4 countries together is important to highlight how future increase in these countries could largely affect the overall energy demand from the Middle East region in the next 20 years. Thus, the scope of the paper is looking at energy demand implications in 4 countries, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Iraq is excluded from the analysis due to the large political uncertainty associated with Iraq's energy development. Here, a regression model is used to forecast energy demand from 5 economic sectors across the 4 countries using projected increase in population and gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030. Results indicate that most of the projected energy demand will be from Iran and Saudi Arabia. In addition, industry and transportation sectors will witness the largest increase among the 5 sectors examined in the paper. For instance, industry and transportation sector will collectively account for 52% and 67% of the projected energy demand in Iran and Saudi Arabia, respectively. Such results are important to highlight when ascertaining sectoral level implications of future energy demands and to determine potential areas where energy savings can be made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY For several years recently, the price of oil has fluctuated due to the weak US dollar and financial risks. In particular, the WTI crude oil price reached $147 per barrel in July of 2008, which is the highest price thus far. An awareness of an impending crisis and concern over climate change are driving an increase in R&D for alternative energy sources instead of fossil-based energy. However, the researches based on traditional method show negative options about the economic value of new and renewable energy. This paper evaluates the value of new and renewable energy through a real option method which considers the uncertainty associated with fossil energy and the uncertainty of the success of R&D. The evaluating model assumes that the fossil energy price follows a geometric mean reverting process and that the probability of success with R&D on renewal forms of energy follows a binomial probability model. The model considers four options: the option to continue R&D, the option to delay R&D, the option to deploy R&D, and the option to abandon R&D. Finally, the value of Korean R&D on renewal forms of energy is analyzed by the model. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fossil fuels provide a significant fraction of the global energy resources, and this is likely to remain so for several decades. Carbon dioxide (CO) emissions have been correlated with climate change, and carbon capture is essential to enable the continuing use of fossil fuels while reducing the emissions of CO into the atmosphere thereby mitigating global climate changes. Among the proposed methods of CO capture, oxyfuel combustion technology provides a promising option, which is applicable to power generation systems. This technology is based on combustion with pure oxygen (O) instead of air, resulting in flue gas that consists mainly of CO and water (HO), that latter can be separated easily via condensation, while removing other contaminants leaving pure CO for storage. However, fuel combustion in pure O results in intolerably high combustion temperatures. In order to provide the dilution effect of the absent nitrogen (N) and to moderate the furnace/combustor temperatures, part of the flue gas is recycled back into the combustion chamber. An efficient source of O is required to make oxy-combustion a competitive CO capture technology. Conventional O production utilizing the cryogenic distillation process is energetically expensive. Ceramic membranes made from mixed ion-electronic conducting oxides have received increasing attention because of their potential to mitigate the cost of O production, thus helping to promote these clean energy technologies. Some effort has also been expended in using these membranes to improve the performance of the O separation processes by combining air separation and high-temperature oxidation into a single chamber. This paper provides a review of the performance of combustors utilizing oxy-fuel combustion process, materials utilized in ion-transport membranes and the integration of such reactors in power cycles. The review is focused on carbon capture potential, developments of oxyfuel applications and O separation and combustion in membrane reactors. The recent developments in oxyfuel power cycles are discussed focusing on the main concepts of manipulating exergy flows within each cycle and the reported thermal efficiencies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Energy conversion systems have assumed a crucial role in current society. The threat of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and the growing world energy demand ask for a more sustainable way of electricity production, eg, by using renewable energy sources, by improving the conversion efficiency and/or by controlling power plant emissions. Despite the relationship between exergy and sustainability stated in literature, exergy losses are usually not considered when comparing systems and energy sources for power generation. The exergetic sustainability assessment method named Total Cumulative Exergy Loss (TCExL) has been used to assess several systems for electricity production, ie, a coal‐fired power plant, a coal‐fired power plant including carbon capture and storage, a biomass‐fired power plant, an offshore wind farm and a photovoltaic park. The results of the TCExL method have been compared with an environmental sustainability indicator, ie, the overall ReCiPe endpoint indicator and the economic indicator named Present Worth Ratio. The offshore wind farm is the best system from the exergetic and environmental point of view. The photovoltaic park is the system with the second‐best scores. However, from the economic viewpoint including subsidy by the Dutch government, the photovoltaic park performs better than the wind farm system and the system that performs best is the biomass‐fired power plant. Without subsidy, only the coal‐fired power plant without carbon capture and storage is profitable. The exergetic sustainability scores of the coal‐fired and biomass‐fired power plants are similar, but from the environmental sustainability viewpoint, the biomass‐fired power plant performs better than both coal‐fired power plants. As the results of environmental and economic sustainability assessments strongly depend on models, weighting factors, subsidy, market prices, etc, while the results of the exergetic sustainability assessment do not, it is recommended that the exergetic sustainability be taken into account when assessing the sustainability of power generation and other technological systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]